So besides bandwidth-related costs and other platform costs like these for keeping Steamworks alive they invested a lot of money to break that monopoly Microsoft has built up. Money don’t grow on trees (except in → Borderlands) and I doubt that they’re able to keep all this stuff running just by selling their own few games. Everyone who publishes games on Steam has to pay 20-30% per sold game to Valve. Yeah, that’s some big chunk. But keep in mind that they’re doing more than just → hosting files and handling payment transactions.

December last year, Tim Sweeney → launched his own store with blackjack and hookers. Their prime feature? Only taking 12% from game developers. It remains to be seen how much Epic is committed to fight against Microsoft’s monopoly with their Windows & Mac only store application. Their engine might support Linux, but the → results→ may vary. Maybe because of his → antiquated beliefs? Time will tell. But I'm pretty sure this won't help anyone but Microsoft.

Mesa Repo Updated To 18.3.0

Attention: I've added transitional packages for libd3d9-mesa and libd3d9-mesa-dev. The new packages are called libd3dadapter9-mesa and libd3dadapter9-mesa-dev - just like the ones in the official Debian repository.

Mesa Repo Updated To 18.2.6

Attention: I've added transitional packages for libd3d9-mesa and libd3d9-mesa-dev. The new packages are called libd3dadapter9-mesa and libd3dadapter9-mesa-dev - just like the ones in the official Debian repository.

Debian Maintainers Finally Decided To Enable Gallium-Nine

The maintainers for Debian's Mesa packages finally decided to build Mesa with Gallium-Nine, providing greater performance in D3D9 applications for anyone who still plays less recent Windows games. I'll watch this situation for one to two releases to see if it is still necessary that I'm rolling my own Mesa packages within deb.c-r-t.tk/.

The following changes will happen nonetheless:

The package apt-pin-mesa will be deprecated

The package libd3d9-mesa needs to be renamed to libd3dadapter9-mesa

The deprecating of apt-pin-mesa will be done by leaving a dummy-package which removes the file containing the pinning from /etc/apt/preferences.d. libd3d9-mesa will become a transitional package referring to libd3dadapter9-mesa while my next builds of Mesa will have libd3dadapter9-mesa packages referring to the old packages.

Having not to deal with regular driver updates, I can focus on other things here at c-r-t.tk/. This blog needs a reboot and there's a lot of overdue maintenance work for prosody. Stay tuned!